Poetry

“A poet who is not also a heretic,” Aldo tells me as I lean forward to catch his words, “is not a poet.” As for the miller Menocchio and for Pasolini, heresy was connatured to Federico’s persona—not a mere intellectual exercise. For Pasolini and Federico, furthermore, it was no longer only about the Catholic Church. It had to do, instead, with their inability and unwillingness to participate in the reigning ideologies of their time: petty bourgeois propriety, at first, and the hedonism that crept behind the countercultural movements of the ’60s and ’70s, later, when capitalist power needed “a new kind of subject,” in the words of Pasolini.

Love found me twice, at once. If it never
happens again I’ll still be luckier

than the moon. Breathing, typing these lines,
texting a friend, checking the time,

thinking it wouldn’t always be like this,
but still, sometimes, it was.    It is.

I had arrived at the all too probably named Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute past its ostensible heyday. Founded in 1974 by Waldman and her “spiritual husband” Allen Ginsberg, the school had the reputation of a mountain retreat for the Beat Poets, and their friends in the New York School, and their friends in the Black Mountain school, and their friends in the New Narrative school.

it’s possible all women make up a secret organization working under the guise of an oppressed class

the women coerced into prostitution they’re the suicide bombers of our terrorist organization
sacrificing themselves for the life of all women and the murder of all
men
a nice romantic image is coming together here
I think I’m one of these women
one of the ones engaged in the struggle against all men for all women

but I know it’s not true
AIDS exists but the struggle doesn’t

but as dinner approaches the question again torments me / what good is poetry with the warhead of world war III / poking me in the back of the head

Usually it tells you a lot about your day-to-day activities, / When, at such a moment of mass enthusiasm, you find it difficult to move, / And you cannot “calmly continue to go about business as usual.”

The fingers that smell of cooking oil, of shit, of industrial cleaners / The fingers stained by the clichés of daily life